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Scream 7 keeps bringing back dead characters - now David Arquette is rising from the grave for the 2026 slasher revival movie!

Dewey Riley marks the first non-Ghostface to be confirmed to be coming back for the seventh movie in the Scream cycle

Published on Wed Mar 05 2025

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Okay, by this point, I’m beginning to think that Scream 7 is set in the afterlife. After the news that the movie would see the return of Scott Foley’s Roman Bridger (who died in Scream 3) and Matthew Lillard’s Stu Macher (who died in the original movie, way back in 1996), now we’re hearing that David Arquette’s Dewey Riley will also appear in the movie… despite dying in 2022’s fifth installment, simply titled Scream.

Variety helpfully notes that “it’s not yet clear exactly how [Dewey’s return is] possible,” but we’ll assume that it’s somehow related to the returns by the other similarly deceased characters in the movie. To be fair, we’ve already had Skeet Ulrich — who also died in the original 1996 movie — show up in both 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI, so it’s not as if the series doesn’t have some history in bringing back dead characters, but this is getting ridiculous.

(For anyone who doesn’t remember, his appearances in both of the latter movies are the result of his being a hallucination of Melissa Barrera’s Sam Carpenter, the central character in both movies who also happens to be the illegitimate daughter of Ulrich’s character from the original movie. Barrera is not appearing in the upcoming Scream 7, however.)

While the mechanic of however all these dad characters are returning remains a mystery, it’s becoming increasingly clear that almost any character who’s died in the previous six Scream movies is up for grabs in this latest installment. Finally, it seems, the potential for a Randy Meeks revival is close at hand!

Scream 7 is currently slated for a February 27, 2026 release.

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Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.